


Wine-Colored

by OffYourBird



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Reality, Blood Kink, F/M, Light Angst, Post-Series, Romance, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-05
Updated: 2017-12-05
Packaged: 2019-02-11 00:17:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12923232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OffYourBird/pseuds/OffYourBird
Summary: There are so many shades of red, but Buffy sticks to the one she knows best.Written for my one year anniversary on EF.





	Wine-Colored

"One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk." - Charles Baudelaire

\---------------------------

 

Wine-colored. Dark, rosy lips and stained tongues. Fingers and satin where liquid spills and stains. Wine-colored. It’s all Buffy can think about anymore. She’s become an expert at drinking alone. Italy, Argentina, South Africa, Portugal. She’s been to them all, and watched the dark liquid swirl in her glass. It looks like blood, she thinks. Ironically, blood doesn’t stain her skin as well, even though she’s covered in it, in all the places no one can see.

Spike saw it, and he paid dearly for that fact in blood of his own. Of course, his was all borrowed, too. He was more covered in blood than she was, inside and outside, and in all the nooks and crannies in between.

She tries to stick to wine these days.

Sometimes the amulet slides out from under her shirt as she drinks and nearly hits the glass. It had been mailed to her, nineteen days after. Thudded right down onto her living room floor.

She left it to sit there for days, the glass throwing kaleidoscopic shadows across the carpet.

It was either a gift or curse, for this to be hers, the amulet that saved the world for the price of Spike’s final death.

Eventually, she called Angel, but he had no real answers for her. “It was meant to be mine,” was all he said. “I guess Wolfram didn’t want it anymore.”

She’d scooped it up from the carpet afterward, with possessive and greedy force. It was hers, then. Hers for the taking, just like everything else about Spike had been. Even saving the world; she knows that was for her.

She tucks the amulet back under her shirt. It makes a bulky presence underneath all her sweaters, and it has a few rough edges that snag her skin, leaving glossy, harder skin in its wake. And when her skin is cut open again – when the edges find some new angle to scratch, because they always do – she is stained with new lines of wine-colored monument. She doesn’t bother to clean the marks – they fade away on their own, eventually. It’s part of the comforting rhythm of memory and pain.

And then it happens. She’s fighting some kind of many-taloned thing (a gerzly– no, gerber – something) and the amulet slips out from under her high collar, where she painstakingly tucked it before patrol. She can’t understand how. She’s always so careful around violence. So careful with this last piece of him; this piece that doesn’t really matter now, of course, except that it matters to her. It’s all she has left – this murder weapon.

And then she doesn’t even have that. One of the talons yanks it from her neck and the chain breaks before she can hardly register the attack. And then all that’s left is smashed crystal on the ground.

Everything blurs. There’s dust – it has to be dust. It can’t be tears; she’s not allowed to cry anymore. Not since crying over wine had her waking up in the morning next to someone peroxide blond and lean, and she thought for sure all her desperate wishes that she wasn’t supposed to say because the  _W_  word had never led to anything good had finally been answered anyway. Except that the body next to hers was warm and wrong and suddenly she couldn’t breathe anymore, and she was out the door before the man –  _W is for wrong_  – could get a word in edgewise.

She stayed away from anything wine-colored for a week after that.

And so now she knows the blurring has to be dust. She hacks the demon to death with gasping ferocity. Its blood is yellow and stinks and she stands staring down at it as it oozes.

When she finally looks up – she’s so afraid to look up, to look over, to see – she thinks she’s finally lost it. Drunk too much wine and burned her last brain cells straight away. But, hey, if this is insanity, it’s looking pretty good.

Because it’s looking exactly like Spike is staring back at her.

She starts laughing. That’s the joy of being crazy – you can laugh anytime. Maybe she should have done this sooner.

It’s his face that ruins the illusion. It looks so confused and hopeful and utterly and completely terrified. She knows she’d never – no matter how far she’s lost it – choose to imagine seeing that kind of expression again.

She stops laughing.

He speaks first, holding out a trembling hand. It’s always him who’s taken the leaps first, after all. Death, love, complete alteration. Always him. She’s too concerned with finding what’s on the other end, after too many blind jumps have ended poorly. He just never looks.

“… Buffy?”

It’s then that she sees the amulet shattered at his feet. She drops the sword in her hand and suddenly she’s flying across the intervening space. He watches her with burning expectancy, meeting her desperate stride with his own fierce one after he recovers himself.

It can’t be more than forty feet, but she’s almost at full speed when she reaches him, arms outstretched. She wants to feel the collision.

Except the collision never comes.

There’s a strange buzzing as she passes through him –  _through_  him – and she nearly smashes into a nearby tree. Pressed against the bark, she turns back to him with wide eyes and they regard each other in shock.

“Seems I might be a bit ghost-like at the moment,” he says finally.

After weeks of research, still none of them are sure what he is, although Willow says he isn’t a ghost _. Not exactly_ , she says. And then Angel’s scientist friend confirms it.  _Incorporeal_ , is the final judgment. Buffy doesn’t really get the difference – both mean touching is off the table.

She talks to him instead, and watches his face light up when she rambles on. They sit in the sun and talk (because if there’s one good thing about not having a physical body, it’s that there’s nothing the sun can burn), and she falls asleep next to him and knows he’ll watch over her until she wakes. He’s always watching her. Ghost or incorporeal or some kind of shade or whatever he is, it doesn’t seem he needs to sleep.

She still wishes he would. All the quiet hours give him too much time to think.

“I’m no good to you like this,” he tells her, when Willow shrugs – yet again – and says there’s nothing she can do. Well, nothing she can do that she hasn’t already tried; all condensed, there’s a pile of hours they’ve spent surrounded by chanting and scientific equipment and stinky herbs (Spike out of necessity and Buffy because she can’t imagine not being the first thing he touches when touching things becomes an option again).

“Was never much of a man,” he tells her, with broken conviction, “and now I’m not even that. You should find someone who can at least touch you.”

She ignores him, except to say, “I love you.” She’s gotten better at that over the last months. It doesn’t sound like a question anymore. It sounds real, like a fact. Like a command.

Spike always falls silent after that. But only for a minute. And then a soft “I love you, too, Buffy,” always follows.

“We’ll find a way,” she tells him fiercely.

He just sighs and looks at her with that soft kind of affectionate surrender that always makes her heart skip a beat. “I know you will, luv.”

The way comes – after ten months of  _fruitless_  experiments – entirely  _organically_. And, hah, that’s two words from the small  _Word of the Day_  calendar she bought five months ago on a lark, with which she and Spike now try to outdo each other by being the one to put the most words from it into any conversation. Spike usually wins – the stupid vamp has a poet’s brain, though he frowns when she mentions it – but he always looks happier on the occasions where she outdoes him.

She is, in fact, using one of their calendar words when it happens. “Ugh,  _sanguine_ ,” she says after a battle, examining a bleeding gash on her palm. Still, she grins (it’s one of her favorite words now, since it came up on August 14) and waves the hand in question at him to emphasize the usage.

He’s standing closer than she realized (she tries to act like she would if he were solid) and her hand goes straight through his ribcage.

He gasps sharply – as if in pain – and she scrambles to attention, alarmed. “Spike? Spike!”

His eyes are shining when they meet hers. “I felt you.”

They both stare at her bleeding hand.

She wipes it across his incorporeal shoulder next and there’s a slight shimmer. When she presses her palm there again, it’s… well, not solid, but it feels like  _something_. Her hand doesn’t quite go through.

She does it to his lips next and kisses him for the first time in almost three years.

The effect disappears after a few minutes, but neither of them is more than temporarily disappointed.

They have a way.

All the experiments are wine-colored now. They try the blood of the other Slayers, but none of it works. It’s just hers. Her blood. Her. The Chosen One yet again.

“I think it has to do with  _that_ ,” Willow tells her, pointing at the long since scarred burn on her left palm. “Your essence got all muddled up with his and the magic from the amulet.”

Buffy freezes. “I made him come back a ghost?”

Willow looks thoughtful for a moment, then shakes her head. “No, but I think you’re the reason he might be solid again someday.”

They make an art of blood play – he can feel her when she bleeds. She can always feel him. The buzzing on the back of her neck has a different zing than it had when he was flesh, but it’s just as potent. Maybe more so now, when she spends all her time reaching out for him with her senses.

One night she asks him to strip naked (watching his incorporeal clothes drift to the floor with a kind of odd curiosity) and bloodies her hand with a knife. He draws in a sharp breath when she reaches down to his cock. It’s erect and bobbing, not seeming to care that Spike says he can’t really feel it.

“Just the stiffy, mind you,” he says with a salacious smirk. “I always want you, no matter what my prick is up to.”

“Well, it is very  _up_ ,” she says with mock thoughtfulness. “So I’m thinking it must want me, too.” She throws him a solemn look, sinking to her knees. “Let’s find out, huh?”

He whimpers unabashedly when her blood brings his cock back to life. She lets the jerking motion encourage the gash on her palm to run fast and fiercely, so fiercely that the feeling of skin beneath her is more solid than she’s felt it since Sunnydale.

And when Spike comes, the jizz is white and creamy and real, and she brings it delicately to her lips to taste, luxuriating in his groans as he watches with wide, pleasure-glazed eyes.

She moves her hand to his lips after that and lets him taste himself.

“You’re mine,” she says softly, as he laps at her messy hand, his tongue a phantom, feathery touch that grows stronger as it ingests her blood and his spendings. There is a slight pause at the realization, and then he laps at her palm in earnest. She’s not quite sure what he’s up to until he asks her to lay back and spread her legs. She trembles and does so, ripping off her own panties in the careless way she knows he’d do it if he could.

The pressure of his tongue on her clit is lighter than its ever been, and it lacks variance, but she still comes after barely any time at all, nearly sobbing at the pleasure of knowing his mouth there again, after so many months of just her own fingers with his low rumbling voice encouraging her on.

After several months of partial substantiality, there’s still no consensus on how much blood it might take for Spike to be solid, or if it’s even possible to keep him solid for more than a few minutes.

“No matter what, testing it means using more blood than you can safely give,” Willows says, biting her lip in consternation at having to be the bearer of bad news.

Spike just snorts at that. “Have you lot not heard of freezers?”

Buffy gives a pint of blood every week, much more slowly than she would like and faster than Spike likes. This is their compromise. After three months, they finally have enough to make up the entire volume of blood that would run through his veins and then some (because it never hurts to have excess when it comes to vampires and blood).

She fills the tub with it and Willow gives it a helping hand by making it all human temperature again. Then the witch smiles awkwardly and leaves, nose scrunching up as she gives the tub a parting glance.

Spike just stares at the darkened soup, where it’s already leaving a staining line on the interior of the tub. “Hell of a party,” he says. Then, with a grin, he sinks right in.

Buffy sits on the edge of the toilet and waits.

She knows he’s drinking her in as he bathes – using her essence to renew himself inside and out – and she imagines what it would be like if she did the same thing – except her bath would be wine instead of blood. Definitely a hell of a party.

When he rises from the tub, fingers gripping the edges – oh god, he’s  _gripping_  the edges – he’s coated in her blood from head to toe (including even his duster – he refused to chance that it would stay incorporeal without him). He strips, his clothes plopping back wetly into the tub, leaving him pale and naked and grinning through fangs, and completely smeared in red.

She thinks it’s the most hideous and most beautiful thing she’s ever seen.

He turns on the shower and pulls the drain. She’s stripping before the water is even hot, and touching him everywhere and feeling  _him_  touch  _her_ , and there’s so much water and blood that she’s not sure if she’s crying or he is, or they both are, and it doesn’t matter which or any of it is true.

He fucks her roughly against the tile wall, both of them worrying that all the touching will disappear right out from under them, that this miracle is impermanent and they’ll only get this bliss every three months, when she’s bled enough again to make them able to feel.

The water runs cold.

“I’m afraid to leave,” she tells him.

There is a pause. “The tub, pet?”

“It’s safe here.”

“It’s freezing.”

“Since when do you care about temperature?”

“I care about  _your_  temperature,” he tells her firmly. He nudges her to put her shivering arms around his neck. “We’ll do it together.”

He lifts her up like a bride and they step out of the tub. His feet squeak slightly on the linoleum floor. It hits her then. He’s still corporeal. “You’re  _tangible_ ,” she whispers against his chest, pulling the word from May 9.

He chuckles and sweeps into the bedroom, dumping them both unceremoniously onto the comforter, wet and dripping, a tangle of limbs. “Entirely bloody  _manifested_ ,” he agrees, a bastardization of the word from September 23.

She wrinkles her nose. “Cheater. The word was  _manifesto_.”

“Poetic license,” he murmurs, with a small smile against her hair.

Buffy winds herself more intensely around every inch of him. “Don’t move.”  _Don’t stop being solid_ , she wants to tell him, but she knows it’s unfair.

“I won’t,” is his resolute answer. He kisses her voraciously, and she knows he knows what she means.

She falls asleep against her will and startles awake before dawn, with a gasp. Cool arms tighten around her, and Spike mumbles sleepily into her shoulder. There’s still a smudge of blood flecked in his hair at his temple, dried and flaking, dark red. She brushes it away with a smile.

She wakes up every morning with the same kind of panic, wondering if today is the day it all falls apart. They take nothing for granted. Most of the time there’s barely enough space to breathe between them (so it’s a good thing only one of them really needs to do it). They don’t bother to leave the apartment much, just in case. Leaving means clothes, means staying untangled and upright.

When Spike is still solid after two weeks and has passed every check known to scientist and witch and Council, they relax slightly. They start to socialize again, and Spike grows twitchy from the amount of affectionate touching (from people other than Buffy) that’s been directed his way. (Except for when they go to see Dawn in England. When her sister hugs him, Spike is trembling so hard that she knows he's trying not to cry.)

At one point, after a reunion with the Scoobies, he looks almost appalled. “Harris  _hugged_  me.”

She laughs and tugs him close. “Face it. You’re in now. It’s part of the gig.”

“Getting man-handled by pirate boy?” His tone is scathing, but his eyes are soft, uncertain.

“Especially that.”

He sighs dramatically. “The things I do for you.”

She pauses then, just for an instant – all of those things hitting her square in the chest. Spike shakes her out of it.

“Hey. I wouldn’t have it any other way, Buffy.”

She’s blinking back tears before she knows it (it’s okay, tears are safe again because they mean Spike is here). She’s gotten so much better at conversation with him since the year he was a ghost, but it’s still a struggle sometimes. She has phrases down –  _I love you, I’m sorry, are you okay?_  – and all the safe calendar words of the day, but the hardest things are the murky things where she’s not even sure the right words exist.

So she sticks to the ones she knows. “I love you.”

And she knows he understands because his face is glowing with love and the kind of rapture he reserves only for her. “Let’s go home,” he says.

And they do, and they sink into the dark burgundy couch she insisted on, to his surprise.

“And I thought I was the one with the blood fixation,” he says, laughter in his voice.

“It’s wine-colored. Not blood-colored.”

"They’re the same color, pet.”

She just smiles and snuggles into his chest as he flips on the TV, fingering the long, smooth pendant necklace he bought her to replace the amulet – her reminder that he’s still here even when she can’t see him. It doesn’t tear at her like the amulet did; it glides effortlessly over slightly scarred skin. “I know.”


End file.
